Name: The Fin
Director: Park Sye-young
Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Thriller
Released: 2025
Duration: 85 min
Cast: Yeon Ye-ji, Kim Pureum, Goh-Woo, Maeng Joo-one, Moon Hye-in

A dying merman’s last request sets the whole grim machinery of Park Sye-young’s second feature in motion. In “The Fin,” the Korean writer-director imagines a peninsula finally reunified and then poisoned, its coastline walled off from a toxic sea and its dirtiest labor handed to a mutated underclass the state would rather not look at.

That underclass has a name, Omega, and a function: scrubbing the ruined water ordinary citizens no longer touch. When a newly recruited civil servant grows suspicious of a quiet employee at a dingy indoor fishing shop, her hunt becomes the film’s engine and its moral test. Park frames the chase less as a thriller than as an interrogation of the faith that lets a society decide who counts as human.

The premise reads like allegory because it is built to. Park stages ecological collapse and political consolidation as a single event, then shows a bureaucracy of exclusion that runs on revulsion rather than argument. The Omegas are visibly, bodily other, and the human administration treats that difference as a licence. Critics who caught the film on its festival run described its engine as the weaponisation of disgust, polarisation enforced through the gut instead of through policy.

The ecological charge is not incidental. The walled-off, poisoned sea gives the film its most potent image, a natural world turned into both dumping ground and prison, and the Omegas are the bodies made to live inside that wound. Park keeps the metaphor pliable enough to hold more than one reading, from climate abdication to the way any state manufactures a population it can afford to use up.

Getting the world onto the screen took patience. “The Fin” spent roughly three years in post-production, a long haul for a picture everyone involved concedes was made on a shoestring. It is a genuinely international object: a South Korean production from Seesaw Pictures, built with the German outfit Essential Filmproduktion and support from Qatar’s Doha Film Institute, and sold worldwide by the Coproduction Office. The creature work and prosthetics that turn actors into Omegas were the budget’s central wager, and the film leans on them rather than on set-piece spectacle.

Park is not starting from nowhere. His debut, “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra,” marked him out as a filmmaker drawn to bodies in revolt and to worlds decaying at their own strange pace, and “The Fin” extends that sensibility into openly political territory. The reunification he imagines is not a reconciliation fantasy but a warning: a single Korea that has simply relocated its cruelty, inventing a new caste to carry the cost of survival.

The look matches the politics. Park trades the neon-soaked gloss of exportable Korean genre cinema for something grimier and more institutional: drab holding rooms, the sickly yellow of a labour crew’s uniforms, the damp half-light of a fishing shop that doubles as a hiding place. The camera watches rather than pounces, and the dread accumulates less through shock than through the slow recognition of how ordinary the system’s cruelty has become.

Yeon Ye-ji plays Mia, the fishing-shop worker whose secret drives the plot, while Kim Pureum is Su-jin, the civil servant whose certainty curdles into something closer to obsession. Goh-Woo appears among the Omegas, with Jeong Young-do, Maeng Joo-one, Moon Hye-in and Woo Seo-yeon rounding out a cast that keeps the register human-scaled even as the world turns monstrous. The performances stay low and watchful, matched to a film that prefers implication to explanation.

That reticence is also where “The Fin” divides opinion. Reviewers have placed it nearer to “Black Mirror” and “Children of Men” than to the maximalist Korean genre cinema that travels most easily abroad, praising its austere control and its refusal of spectacle. It is mood over money, dread held at a simmer, and for many that restraint is the point.

Yeon Ye-ji in a still from The Fin, the 2025 dystopian film by Park Sye-young — Yeon Ye-ji in *The Fin* (2025)

What the restraint costs is clarity. Park deliberately withholds the contemporary Korean iconography that would anchor his world, and the abstraction cuts both ways. The pre-collapse past, the origin of the Omegas and the geopolitics beyond the wall stay fragmentary by design, and viewers who want their dystopias explained will leave holding questions the film has no intention of answering. Whether that opacity reads as discipline or as evasion is the argument “The Fin” invites, and it declines to settle it. The film asks to be felt more than understood, which is a demand not every audience will accept.

Since its world premiere in competition at the Locarno Film Festival’s Filmmakers of the Present strand, “The Fin” has travelled the festival circuit rather than the multiplex, with berths at Sitges, the Sarajevo Film Festival, Taipei’s Golden Horse, Germany’s Filmfest Hamburg and the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival, where it opened theatrically. A wide commercial release across most territories, a firm Korean opening included, has yet to be confirmed. For now the film belongs to the festival calendar and to the audiences willing to seek out a Korea that has drowned its own conscience and gone looking for someone else to blame.